12/27/22: FROM TWITTERBIRD TO MOCKINGBIRD W/ KRISTAN T. HARRIS

Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter for 40 billion dollars, the Left realizes the control they have had on this highly-popular online platform is about to meet its demise. We are becoming uncomfortably aware of how propaganda works and how social media has been effectively used as a weapon of psychological warfare by government and corporate entities. As Musk loosens up the censorship mechanisms within Twitter, the triggered are becoming “twitterpated” because they know that their ability to control the narrative is being curtailed. Tonight on Ground Zero, Clyde Lewis talks with investigative journalist, Kristan T. Harris about FROM TWITTERBIRD TO MOCKINGBIRD.

SHOW SAMPLE: 

SHOW PODCAST: 

12/27/22: FROM TWITTERBIRD TO MOCKINGBIRD W/ KRISTAN T. HARRIS

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: 

At the end of every year, real journalists get together and try to come up with the 10 or 20 most censored stories of the year.  In 2022, I wonder how they can limit their list to just 20.

You can argue that most of the news we tried to get was either censored or overtly fact-checked by the Internet.  What has happened at the end of this year has demonstrated that there are overt controls over that narrative and this exposure again vindicates the so-called conspiracy theorists that have warned everyone about all the corruption that has been going on behind the scenes.

Throughout conflicts between the political parties, the question of language and communication looms crucial. The language that is used by each party helps define the terms of the conflict, interests, and objectives. A key factor in conflicts is information that, if misleading or false, can lead to misperceptions about the parties, their objectives, and their strategies.

Due to the powerful effects of television, news images, and their impact on its audience, it becomes increasingly easier to distract people from the facts and frame the narrative in a way that spins a lie or a conspiracy theory to implicate someone or to create a scapegoat.

From there, social media takes over and while it can be used as a magnifying glass for a framed narrative provided by the mainstream, it is countered by other conspiracy yarns that are compelling and complex.

The mainstream media in its framing war will tell you that conspiracy theories are divisive, dangerous, and even, evil. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ has long been used to discredit anyone pointing out collusion between powerful people, but efforts to pathologize dissent as ‘conspiracism’ are doomed to collapse under the weight of reality.

Corruption is rampant in the halls of power, that is as certain as death and taxes, and will continue to be this way no matter what party controls the government. However deep division continues in the United States. It has gone from a form of team rivalry to a form of Middle Eastern sectarianism. it is a fight between cults and the biggest enemy of all is waiting somewhere in Davos waiting to install their beast system and a number of other surprises like a world war, another pandemic, and the eventual culling of those who were swindled into experimenting with their bodies through a process of coercion and blatant criminality.

The biggest tool that the current administration has been using is the weaponization of the security state and the overall surveillance that comes with metadata that is in every single social media platform.

I know that it is not news that both Twitter and Facebook were stacking the decks against those who were seeking different opinions on Covid-19, Climate Change, and the election.

In 2020, it was reported in the New York Post that any information regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal was suppressed as well.

It was reported that Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian energy magnate who asked the family to use their influence to shut down an investigation into his company.

Biden’s corruption in Ukraine has been evident since his son was appointed to the board of the largest energy company in Ukraine within weeks of the US-backed coup in 2014.

Joe Biden himself has even admitted to applying financial pressure to get a Ukrainian State Prosecutor removed from office. Again, this is not really news and for some, this is all academic — I just need to set up the timeline for what I am attempting to report tonight and that is the trending story of the Twitter files and the direct moderation of the CIA at Twitter.

The Twitter Files are a set of internal Twitter documents such as screenshots, emails, and chat logs that were provided by CEO Elon Musk to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger and David Zweig for them to present to the public. Musk had purchased Twitter for $44 billion earlier this year, taking over as CEO on October 27. The goal of presenting the documents to the public was to criticize the decisions of Musk’s predecessors, scrutinize past content moderation at the company, and to expose alleged bias and government influence in content moderation.

The decision to share this information with select individuals came amid significant layoffs at the company, including the content moderation teams. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the release of the documents with Twitter management, releasing the details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.

The first installment, presented by Taibbi on December 2, 2022, described what Taibbi said were elements of the deliberation process Twitter took regarding content moderation related to a New York Post article on the Hunter Biden laptop controversy in October 2020, as well as some other content.

Taibbi tweeted that the FBI gave Twitter a “general” warning about foreign hacks and leaks but that the Twitter files contained “no evidence … of any government involvement in the laptop story”. Taibbi also did not say any Democrats had asked Twitter to suppress the story.

The second installment, presented by Weiss on December 8th, addressed what Musk and others have described as the shadow banning or “visibility filtering” by previous Twitter management.

Twitter announced in 2018 a new policy of limiting the reach of accounts exhibiting patterns of “troll-like behaviors”, which resembled Musk’s newly announced “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach” policies intended to limit the spread of “negativity.”

The third installment, released by Taibbi on December 9, highlighted events within Twitter leading to Trump’s suspension. The fourth installment, released on December 10 by Shellenberger, covered how Twitter employees reacted to the January 6 United States Capitol attack, and the conflict within Twitter on how to moderate tweets and users who were supporting the attack. The fifth installment, released on December 12 by Weiss, covered how Twitter employees influenced the decision to ban Trump from the platform. The sixth installment, released on December 16 by Taibbi, described how the FBI contacted Twitter to suggest that action be taken against a number of accounts for allegedly spreading election disinformation.

In the seventh installment, posted on December 19, Shellenberger claimed the FBI and the intelligence community interacted with Twitter employees to moderate the coverage of the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.[

This is a blatant black listing.  And unfortunately, there are people that support this and some people decided to leave Twitter in some virtue-signaling political move that unwittingly pegs them as either ignorant or supportive of the intelligence apparatus filtering opinion and news on a social platform.

More document dumps  contain information stating that the FBI and the CIA were involved in content moderation on the social media

This is the internet version of Project Mockingbird.

Project Mockingbird was a secret CIA campaign to spread disinformation and false stories to foreign governments during the Cold War. The CIA did this by manipulating the media into focusing on propaganda, sabotage, and subversion.

It was later revealed in Congressional hearings that the CIA operatives were literally paying off editors and reporters and most mainstream news outlets: the New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, and countless others.

Frank Church led one of the most important oversight investigations ever undertaken by Congress into covert operations by the U.S. intelligence community.  No one called him a traitor or accused him of being a communist or Nazi. Nobody said he supported hate — the latest onslaught of left-wing temper tantrums reveals what we are dealing with.

After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement:

“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Conspiracy theorist and misinformation are their default replies to anything that exposes their corruption.

The Twitter Files show the FBI acting as gatekeepers to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force, which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state governments.

Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track.

A report from The Epoch Times indicates that per a reveal through the “Files,” the FBI has actually been working closely with the social media company. That got the attention of Rep. Mike Turner, who will become the chairman for the House Intelligence Committee early next year.

The internal Twitter documents, offered up by its new owner Elon Musk, note that the FBI and the social media giant had “constant and pervasive” communications, with the bureau treating it as a “subsidiary” and noting accounts and tweets that needed action taken against them – going against the rights of free speech.

This ties in with reports that the bureau had been monitoring the actions of several hundred American parents, which several former employees turned whistleblowers have since confirmed.

Tuner stated: “We certainly intend to pursue subpoena power to expose the extent to which the FBI has been doing this.”

Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.

Furthermore, we are learning and in some cases having our suspicions confirmed that Twitter provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in various topics being pushed in a narrative like election fraud, COVID-19, Vaccine effectiveness, Climate Change, Russiagate, the war in Ukraine and other subjects like operations in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, North Korea and beyond.

Now I know why I got the call to back off from North Korea reports.

The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools.

Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.

The direct assistance Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.

A major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, or “deep fakes.”

The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “websites, that intentionally doled out government propaganda,  meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military

By the way, a lot of these antagonizing posts were either bots or were blamed on Russia and China.

In 2018, for instance, Twitter announced the mass suspension of accounts tied to Russian government-linked propaganda efforts. Two years later, the company boasted of shutting down almost 1,000 accounts for association with the Thai military. But rules on platform manipulation, it appears, have not been applied to American military efforts or left wing political interests.

Due to the powerful effects of television, news images, and their impact on its audience, it becomes increasingly easier to distract people from the facts and frame the narrative in a way that spins a lie or a conspiracy theory to implicate someone or to create a scapegoat.

From there, social media takes over and while it can be used as a magnifying glass for a framed narrative provided by the mainstream, it is countered by other conspiracy yarns that are compelling and complex.

The mainstream media in its framing war will tell you that conspiracy theories are divisive, dangerous, and even, evil. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ has long been used to discredit anyone pointing out collusion between powerful people, but efforts to pathologize dissent as ‘conspiracism’ are doomed to collapse under the weight of reality.

The Twitter Files illustrate this and I am sure the mainstream would be pained– if there was a big reveal that they have participated in the meddling of the election, and have been responsible for fueling the fires of political division in the country by continuing their blind and intentional reporting of Pentagon propaganda.

Once again, the mainstream media is being forced to confront this charade we are calling the political process. Those who are still participating and cheering on the circus are becoming useful idiots for the system– and biases are becoming liabilities to our freedom of speech and other freedoms provided by the bill of rights.

The truth is being revealed now in a not-so-subtle way and the revelations are not coming from the framed narrative that people like to call “credible mainstream news.”  Our suspicions about social media are being confirmed.

what was once called the fifth column – is now overtaking the Fourth Estate — the mainstream media is generating a climate of insurgence, and the guerrilla social media has sent it over the precipice.

Habitual secrecy and corruption has made what we call, the Fifth Column, the Fourth Estate.

This is where the Twitter Bird has transformed into the mockingbird.

What is stated in our Constitution and Bill of Rights is a declaration of the supreme power of the common man. Even if it remains an ideal and a large gap remains to be filled in reality, it was a move away from the single power of a monarchy, by a King, aristocrat or elected official. It recognizes the ordinary human being as the active critical agent within any society.

Independence of citizens in their thoughts and actions from outside forces such as governments, religions or corporations is fundamental to this declaration and made explicit in the First Amendment. This independence makes it possible for people to freely connect with fellow citizens and organize and to form a type of government based on mutual aid.

The global stateless dimension of the Internet created loopholes in existing national laws and power structures. On the platform of this borderless Inter-network, a transnational domain has been created where the First Amendment can be applied anywhere.

Vital information that had been concealed and controlled within the nation-state and corporate boundaries could now be set free.

This government seems threatened by basic First Amendment free speech activity, the right to assemble and foremost the coalescing power of ordinary people globally.

In the end, the war on the First Amendment has actually made us all enemies of the state.

This is why this story is vital but is being ignored by compromised media.

 

SHOW GUEST: KRISTAN T. HARRIS

THERUNDOWNLIVE is an independent news and talk radio program hosted by nationally acclaimed independent journalist and talk radio personality, Kristan T. Harris. The broadcast is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is syndicated on KGRA-db radio, smart TVs as well as online through iHeartRadio, Spotify and wherever podcasts are be found. Our information is powered by citizen journalists throughout America. The Rundown Live is  sourced by mainstream and independent news organizations, including as a foundation for fact-checking conspiracies by some mainstream outlets such as Snopes and Politifact.

Written by Ron Patton